1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to transferring remotely stored data across a network and, more particularly, to transferring objects across a network to a local computer from a remotely connected computer and displaying the transferred data.
2. Background Description
Computers running software referred to as web browsers for connecting to a remote computer system, retrieving the contents of a database on the remote system and visually displaying the retrieved data on a local client system, are well known in the art. Typically, images are requested by a web browser user on a client computer system. The remote system receiving the request, retrieves the images from the database and transmits the images across what is commonly referred to as the internet or world wide web (www). The apparent speed of the transfer is directly proportional to the amount of data that must be transferred. Accordingly, to improve apparent transfer speed, reduce the amount of time that the user must wait for the transfer and to minimize web traffic congestion, data reduction or compression methods are constantly being sought.
Thus, there are various well known data reduction standards such as those referred to as JPEG, TIFF and GIF for images, MPEG for movies and RP3 for sound. However, even employing these well known standards, transferring data required to present a relatively simple image may cause a significant delay, thereby resulting in inactive or dead time at the client system. Accordingly, there is a need for data compression methods for improving internet image transfers.